Science vs. Religion

May 11, 2007

The debate between science and religion is a canard, but clearly it is where one gets the big bucks these days. Check out this list of funding areas from the Templeton Foundation. If you can muster something nice and conciliatory to say on the topic of science and religion then there is probably a publisher out there who would like to talk to you.. your odds double if you happen to be a scientist.

I don't trust this whole business and anyway I have never understood why I should care what some biologist or physicist has to say about religion. Consider the education of a scientist: an undergraduate education that allows for a few electives and then graduate school entirely focused on acquiring a research skill. Contemplation of religion will be mostly a personal matter.. and since most people in the US are religious, many scientists will continue their religious beliefs, with slight modification. Then miraculously this scientist becomes an authority figure on religion.. or someone who can get paid to recount how she reconciled science with her religious faith.

Talking about science and religion may be an overall aid to religious belief. It keeps the focus on questions that can be taken as unknowables: is there a God? is there such a thing as miracles? could there be angels? do we have an eternal soul? Science does have something to say about each of these questions.. but the answers will also never be conclusive. Perhaps asking about religion and science is like asking about the relationship of nationalism and science. We might be able to find something to say about nationalism and science.. but it is not the most insightful direction from which one could approach the topic..

Problems mount for religion as soon as one leaves the realm of metaphysics and starts talking about history or philology. Whether we are talking about Hebrew scripture, the New Testament, the Qur'an.. or the story of the Buddha.. religious claims on examination fit comfortably within a cultural context. I have been reading the Qur'an this term, and one constant theme is its inimitability. The standing challenge for those who oppose Muhammad is to create something like the Qur'an.. and if they were unable, then the Qur'an must be divine. But despite this challenge most evident to a modern reader is the extent to which the book partakes of Arabian culture. The references to jinn, popular stories about biblical figures like Solomon, and contemporary social practices make the Qur'an a book that is obviously a part of its cultural context. The same thing happens upon close examination of Hebrew scripture and the Book of Mormon.

Most damaging to religious faith is the work of competent historians or philologists. Unique religious claims get contextualized and as soon as that happens they become less compelling as documents pointing toward an eternal truth. This process of contextualization will also cover the development of religious bodies like the "church" or "ummah". It is difficult to see these as miraculous God-aided communities when they conform to what we expect of movements and social change.

A renewed emphasis on the importance of history and philology in the study of religion will also have the salutary result of correcting some of the idiot attacks against religion. The following is a paragraph from a review of the new book by Christopher Hitchens:

Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all?

I find these critiques blindingly stupid.. and they appear to stem from an inability to think of religion in historical terms. The above critique of the Ten Commandments might make sense if one accepted the fame story of Moses getting them from God on top of Mount Sinai, but if one thinks historically about the development and cultural use of this story, then the critique makes no sense at all.